23 comments
ALOE = Scheme + Smalltalk + Types
https://github.com/dharmatech/2026-09-02-aloe-racket
Prototype is in Racket.
I'm curious: does anyone really care about Racket anymore? In general, does anyone really care about esoteric languages anymore?
With AI, we have converged on a set of languages. For the web, it's JavaScript or TypeScript. For backend, it's Go and Rust. Pretty much nothing else can get picked by AI if you start a new project. If you even like a language like Elixir, there seems to be less and less incentive to use it in production when AI can replicate a lot of its features in Rust for one-tenth of the cost and 10 times the speed of Elixir.
I'm saying this as someone who is designing a programming language, and for me, it's just a lot of fun, but I also know I should not hope for my language to take off anytime soon.
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I think the Lisp family of languages are still the productivity boost they always were, especially with a good REPL. They can be as fast and safe as Rust and more expressive than JavaScript doing front end work. The deep support for macros and more really let you mold a program to fit the problem domain. Frontier models are reported to work as effectively with Lisp as any other language, and you can have much more succinct (token efficient) code while having more meaningful abstractions for readability by humans. I expect the two should go very well together. Plus you're dealing with a single language without the complexity of something like Rust or inconsistencies of JavaScript.
Also, I wish your comment wasn't downvoted to oblivion. I'd hope there are other useful responses that people won't be able to view.
Absolutely agree. I’d take a guess that a decent chunk, if not majority of “business” applications probably still exist in either Django or Spring Boot. Should all of those be rewritten now “just ‘cause”?